Samsung gets to sell loads of smartphones with a proven operating system, and Google gets to cash in on all those smartphone sales through app sales and traffic to its stable of mobile services.

Jeffrey Cullen/The Wall Street Journal

And in Samsung’s latest corporate missive, posted on its official blog, the South Korean company can’t stop gushing about Google’s central role in its new Samsung Gear Live smartwatch.

In the post, Samsung calls the smartwatch, which runs Google’s Android Wear operating system, “another collaboration done right” between the two companies, highlighting the device’s “access to the rich pool of Android apps,” the real-time feed of Google Now and special optimization for Google mobile services such as Google Voice, Google Maps, Gmail and Google Hangouts.

“Samsung and Google have maintained a long-term close relationship,” Samsung says. “In such a competitive industry, Gear Live serves as a great example of the possibility and the benefit of collaborations.”

That may be so. But in a telling passage towards the end, Samsung gets philosophical — and hints ever so delicately at a broader corporate strategy that doesn’t revolve solely around Android.

“We at Samsung believe that the most important thing is to provide consumers with a great experience, and in an industry so diverse and fast changing, it’s key to make sure consumers have the liberty and luxury of ‘choice,’” Samsung says.

While the word “Tizen” goes unmentioned in the blog post, the Tizen operating system — Samsung’s homegrown alternative to Android — lurks between the lines.

Next week, in Russia, Samsung will unveil its first smartphone powered by Tizen, putting Samsung in more direct competition with its Mountain View, Calif.-based ally.

The indirect reference is a reminder that, for all the affection Samsung is publicly voicing for Google, even the best of friends go through tough times.

As has been recounted several times — most recently in a Bloomberg Businessweek cover story profiling Google’s new Android chief Sundar Pichai — it all came to a head in January, when Samsung unveiled a new user interface for its Android-powered tablets that didn’t look too much like Android.

In fact, most of the Google apps were tucked away in hard-to-find places, which led to “enraged executives at Google,” the report said.

As for Tizen, to hear Samsung tell it, there’s nothing particularly special about its homegrown Android alternative. After all, Samsung has released devices running all kinds of operating systems, even Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system.

If there’s any larger strategy at play, Samsung says, it’s not trying to muscle out Android with Tizen; it’s simply that the company wants to offer consumers all kinds of choices — between Android, Windows Phone and Tizen, for instance.

Put it that way and it all sounds quite harmless, right? Just the sort of thing that Google might agree with, you say? Well, kind of.

“I view Tizen as a choice which people can have,” Pichai, the Android chief, said in the interview published last month. “We need to make sure Android is the better choice.”